Esafety in context

Had a fantastic afternoon with the Y5s at a primary school, what a lovely bunch they are. The school didn’t just want an esafety session where I went in and scared the ‘bejesus’ out of them, they wanted to focus more on developing children as the leaders in esafety. So we focused on the year 5s. After discussing what they got up to on the web, how it works and what the dangers could be (they were full of the dangers!) we focused in on how we could ‘practise’ how to behave on the web using our secure learning platform environment. The children were shown “reasonablyclever.com” and made avatars. We then used these as a starting point to developing their own home pages. I’m sure some will make mistakes over time as to what they post on there but at least it is in a secure environment where teachers can take the initiative to use them for esafety work- basically a specific aspect of PSCHE. It was really pleasing to see that the children were as much engaged in discussion about what was appropriate for their avatars as which buttons to press. I think the consensus was that subtle tattoos on an avatar were ok but not smoking cigarettes!

The plan is now for the year 5s to lead esafety sessions across KS2 in a similar model. I think this proactive approach is a really positive step as it will have more impact than an “esafety lesson” every now and again.